


Ansiktet

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Light Bondage, M/M, Sensory Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 01:23:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15183650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: This isn't magic.





	Ansiktet

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is the original Swedish title of Ingmar Bergman's film, The Magician, meaning "the face".  
> This takes place early in season four, when Bruce is acting like a little Bat-jerk.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. This story and the work it's based on are fiction. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

But you-  
“I don’t do things like this,” you say, hoping to sound confident, self-assured, maybe a little derisive. Not totally out of your depth. Not that.  
“Well, that, Lucius, is rather the fucking point.”  
In over your head.  
“It’s not as though it would be you.” Alfred shows his teeth. It could be a smile. “Not completely.”  
You say nothing. What is there to say?  
Alfred laughs, finishes his drink. “Don’t dismiss it out of hand,” he says, softly hopeful in a way that makes you feel an aching tenderness for him, “Just think about it for a while.” He stands, leans over you and kisses you, not gently, but better for it, for the full blast of his affection. Your heart crushes a beat like something unimportant in a fist. You watch Alfred pour himself another drink.  
But of course, you don’t have to think.  
It’s totally out of the question.  
It’s actually sort of insulting.  
Who asks for things like that? Who asks you to pretend to be a dead man? Who would ask you to pretend to be Thomas? What shocks you, truly shocks you, is that this is the first time that you wonder: how much does Alfred know? Now, you must also ask yourself: how much do you want to know? And how is it that you’d never wondered before?  
What does Alfred want you to know?  
That’s not the question you should be asking.  
You do know. The knowledge is now inescapable, a hand resting on your shoulder, fingers ready to constrict, to grip. If you try to get away from it, it will hold you fast.  
You look at Alfred, his back still turned, as though he were examining the books on the shelf before him. His posture could be one of regret. It could be shame. It could be private reverie. It could be an invitation.  
You stand. You approach him.  
“I couldn’t really pretend to be him,” you say. You hope you sound amused, chastising, taunting. This is a stupid fantasy, and Alfred is stupid for having it, even stupider for actually telling you about it, expecting you to indulge it. “I hope you know that you’d just be setting yourself up for disappointment.”  
He turns to regard you. He looks a little more dazzled than usual for this time of night. His throat is flushed. Private reverie. Or shame. “Not at all, Lucius, not at all. I know who I’m with.” He looks so good. “But there’s freedom in letting oneself go, don’t you think? If it’s with someone you trust.”  
“All right,” you say. You don’t know what you sound like, now.  
“I’d be blindfolded, of course.”  
“Oh, of course.” This is absurd. You can smell the alcohol sweating out of him. You can smell his cologne. Before you actually touch him, you can feel his throat beneath your lips, the grain of his skin, the heat of his blood, the dumb thrum of his pulse. He puts down his glass, but doesn’t touch you until you take his hands and put them on you.  
“Tie me to the bed, if you’d like,” he says absently.  
“Why do you want to do this?” you ask, finally. Somehow, you know, you feel it twitch minutely in the back of your brain, that this isn’t the question you should be asking, either. But it’ll do.  
“I miss him,” he says simply.  
Yes, of course.  
You’re not cruel. This isn’t you. None of this, actually, as you said, is you. You know how you ended up here, can see the steps it took to get here, but it still seems like such a mismatched series of events. Maybe you’ve been living someone else’s life.  
That, of course, would explain everything.  
You never realized how much your life was shaped by hi-  
You should leave. You should go home, and think for a long time about what it is you really want.  
In the hallway, Alfred begins to speak, too loudly. You touch his arm, give him a warning look.  
“What I was just about to say is that we have the house to ourselves. So, there’s no need to whisper.”  
“Oh. Where is-”  
“Do you think he tells me what he’s doing and where he is? I’m lucky if I get a ‘hello’, these days, when I give him his morning aspirin.”  
“I see. Say no more.”  
Of course, you don’t leave.  
You go to Alfred’s bedroom, where he makes a point of leaving the door open when he kisses you.  
“You exhibitionist,” you say.  
“It’s not exhibitionism if there’s no one there. Unless you’re concerned about a house full of ghosts.”  
Before you can say anything, Alfred turns around, and you know he wants you to follow. For a moment, you watch him, watch the way he walks, before you push the door slightly. Now, it’s not open; merely ajar. You follow.  
You barely get a kiss before he’s on his knees. You wonder-  
But you let yourself get swept up, because it would be too much work to protest something you don’t really want to protest, and because Alfred was right: it does feel good to lose yourself. You let yourself get a little rough. You hear the sounds that Alfred makes when you pull his hair, push into his mouth. It’s easy to want it this way. It must be because he wants it.  
Suddenly, you realize that you don’t understand him at all.  
He lets you come in his mouth. Instead of waiting for him to stand up again, you kneel with him, kiss him. He lets himself be eased back, onto the floor. Even as you feel him wanting to get up, he lets you continue to kiss him. You rest your full weight on him. Before you realize what you’re doing, you’re holding his wrists. Not very tightly, and he could certainly free himself, but it’s unmistakable. And he knows. That you know. That this is what he wants. You feel it, in the way that he settles down, lets you do what you want with him. Now, you can kiss him as much as you want to. Now, you can take off his vest, and his tie, and unbutton his shirt, and look at the scars on his body, which you’ve already seen, but which never fail to shock you, to fill you with dread. So, why don’t you want to stop looking at them?  
“Some of those are older than you are,” Alfred says, not for the first time, smiling with one side of his mouth.  
You know which ones are old, and which ones are recent. The old ones are white, feel like they’re made from inanimate material, leather or rubber. They couldn’t really be part of him. The recent ones look too much like flesh, distorted, mangled, discolored. The skin puckers like an expression of disapproval; it’s too pink, too new. In some places, there is no feeling; in others, too much. He keeps his arms raised, as though putting his hands up in surrender, and when you remember, you put your hands down on his elbows and hold them against the floor. You kiss the scars, thinking of some weird movie you saw in a half-empty theater at a midnight showing. Flesh becoming appliance, and appliance becoming flesh. In a way, that’s what a scar is: a tool mark; the fossil imprint of what made it; a reflection, a kind of hollow symmetry. Has Alfred become the things that hurt him? Are you also making love to all of that?  
He lets you pull down his pants, and go down on him lying on the floor. You hold down his hips, feel him move, rubbing himself against the carpet. Later, he’ll show you pale red abrasions on his ass. One of them looks slightly like a bitemark. You’d never guess what really made it. So much for all of your elegant ideas, you suppose.

You’re buying time. He won’t bring it up again, because it’s not in his nature to push, but you know that he’s waiting. It feels like a test of some kind. Of what, though? What you’re willing to do for him? How far you’ll go?  
No, not that.  
“The clothes won’t fit,” you say. You wait for recognition to fix and work on him.  
“They will if you have them tailored to fit you.”  
He wants to see what you’re made of, how durable it is. Try to shove in stray pieces where they don’t belong, and see how much you resist. See how much life resists death.  
“That would seem to defeat the purpose, though. They wouldn’t really be his clothes anymore.”  
“There’s more to memory than just the visual.”  
“I see.”  
“There’s scent,” Alfred continues unnecessarily, his eyelids lowering in a way that looks too calculated to be intentional. He comes closer. “You get the feel of a person. You know how his clothing feels against you.”  
“When you’re naked, presumably.”  
“I would have to be. You learn to recognize… the sound of him approaching. You learn to anticipate it.”  
You remember.  
“You remember.” You were looking somewhere else, hadn’t been aware… so you can’t be certain that he really said this. You were thinking it. That’s all that happened.  
You want to again ask him why, but, somehow, you know that this will ruin it. It’ll take something from Alfred, something one might say he shouldn’t have, but he needs.  
“Tell me what you want,” you say.  
“Nothing elaborate.” Alfred smiles. You think of the first time you saw him smile. You think of how you knew that there was something in it, that it wasn’t just a simple expression. Of course, you were right. Though, not, at first, in the way you’d imagined. Not when he made you understand why he was there, and what you were going to do for him, and what would happen if you betrayed Bruce Wayne. For quite some time, you felt like a fool. But you had been right. Both impulses had to have existed on the night you met, been inextricable from each other, and must still be. He had to have known. That you, yourself, were someone left behind by Thomas. A part of him, in a way. Hand-picked by him for the Research and Development department after he read your doctoral thesis. Given a job simply because it was his will; no formal interviews, no meeting with the rest of the department. Just you and Thomas over a cup of coffee, and it was finished. You’d wanted to be skeptical of his generosity, think it nothing but a rich man’s whim, to think that he could be just as capriciously cruel as he could be suddenly kind. Of course, this was nothing like it. Even for everything he concealed, he was exactly what he seemed to be. You only had to look, be willing to look, and he would reveal all.  
He wants to see if you still love Thomas.  
Or if he does.  
Or if, in fact, there’s a way to keep him alive between the two of you. Love him by loving each other.  
“Just slip on some of his clothes, and have your way with me. Nothing too unpleasant.”  
“No,” you say, softer than you mean to, “Not at all.”  
“You will, then?”  
What could he have been thinking?  
What’s he thinking of?  
You should say that you still need time. You should say that you need to wrap your head around this. You should ask him more questions, as though you’re trying to understand. You shouldn’t be this easy. You shouldn’t be this transparent. You shouldn’t be this desperate. You shouldn’t be this way.  
Now, suddenly, you understand something: if you do this, you won’t be this way. You won’t be yourself, at least in a sense, at least for a little while.  
“All right.”  
Alfred smiles.  
But who will Alfred be?

He lets you pick which suit you’ll wear. Your hand lingers over the finer ones, waiting to see how Alfred reacts. Accidentally, your fingers brush the sleeve of an unassuming gray jacket. He flinches.  
“It’s quite a distinguished color,” he says, when you hold it up to yourself, “Not too somber, not too gay. Summer-weight. For sunset cocktail parties. I haven’t seen this one in… well, more years than I can count, now. Isn’t it funny how time passes? Everything so close, but so far away.”  
He puts it in a garment bag, and you take it away to have it altered. After that…  
You really have no idea what you’re doing.  
You now know the truth, of course, about Thomas and Alfred. This long ago lost the ring of personal fantasy. It couldn’t be so… necessary if it weren’t some sort of remembrance, some sort of mourning ritual.  
You don’t understand it.  
You don’t.  
You appear at the appointed hour, having been told that Bruce is again away. You enter the house with the key that you were given. If it feels for a moment like the house is really yours, that’s simply the power of association: it’s difficult not to feel a sense of ownership when putting a key in a lock. If the motion makes you think of scars as negative images of the implements that made them, of one reflecting the other, that’s another simple association. This is not magic. It’s psychology.  
You think, suddenly, of Edward Nygma, and that last riddle of his.  
Now, why would you want to be someone else? If we’re going to talk about locks and keys, and negative images. Your father used to love the phrase “It takes two to tango.” You’re not as easily-led as you might appear to be, nor are you as obliging. Is this better, or worse?  
You--  
He--  
He waits for you in his bedroom. The door is closed. Inside, it’s dark. Before you close the door behind you, you see him lying in bed, face-down, his head to the side, as though he were asleep, his hands up. When you get closer, you realize that he’s wearing a sleep mask. Maybe he really is asleep. Maybe you have the wrong idea. Maybe you misunderstood; it wasn’t supposed to happen tonight.  
But he-  
“Thomas?”  
Obviously, you can’t answer. That would give it away. You say, “Shh.” You come closer, brush the sleeve of the jacket against his mouth.  
“I knew it was you,” he says.  
Earlier, you’d asked, “What about a safe-word?”  
He’d laughed: “Forget the bloody safe-word.”  
Does he really know you? Do you, in fact, know yourself?  
You open the drawer of the bedside table. Somehow, you knew what you would find. At least it’s not handcuffs. You tie first one wrist, then the other loosely to the headboard with the scarves you found. And now-  
Now, you have to do something, don’t you?  
You’ve seen the scars on Alfred’s back. He doesn’t talk about them. Except for once, when he’d had too much to drink. At the time, you thought that he had to be joking. Now, you know that he was not. It occurs to you, in a very soft but very cold way, that he might expect it. If that was something that they used to do together.  
But you-  
You take off the belt, Thomas’ belt. You hear the sound Alfred makes. You can’t hit him very hard. It’s barely a tap on his shoulder, but he still moans; the bed still complains under him as he moves. You try again. He says Thomas’ name.  
It’s so very strange. Maybe you were right. Maybe Thomas could be as cruel as he could be kind. How could you have missed it? Yet, it’s not really cruelty, because this is what Alfred wants. It could be that Thomas was hesitant. Not unwilling, but not enthusiastic, either. He could be that way: he knew what needed to be done, but he made it understood that he was acting out of duty, not pleasure. Maybe even in his cruelty, he was kind. You hit him again, listen to the sounds he makes. If it has an effect on you, it’s just the sound, unconnected to what’s happening. You don’t-  
You hit him again.  
Again.  
He says Thomas’ name. He says ‘Please’. He may be weeping. You’d have to lift the mask to tell. Somehow, to do that would be, you want to say disrespectful. If you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it right. You’re not going to hurt Alfred, and you’re not going to hurt this… thing that he has or he needs or he’s attempting to hold onto.  
I thought you weren’t that obliging.  
You’re not, which is why you kiss all of the places you’ve just struck him. Once, you think you taste blood. It should scare you. Maybe it does. You’re on top of him, the bedsheet between you. You touch him through the sheet, run your hands down his body. He’d like that, you think. It could be anyone, now.  
But you’re not-  
So, you pull the sheet down, kiss his back, the backs of his thighs. With some effort, you get your hand under him, touch his cock, as much as the angle will allow. It occurs to you that this might not be what he wants, that he purposely narrowed the possibilities of what you could do to him. It occurs to you that you don’t care. You keep touching him, feeling the way he moves, irritated, twisting, rubbing against you. If it hurts him, it hurts you, too.  
There is lube, but no condoms in the drawer of the bedside table. You have a choice. It’s not one he’s given you; it’s one you’ve found or manufactured, all by yourself. Is he telling you something, now? And if they-  
But he’s not here.  
That’s the point.  
You lubricate your fingers. For a long time, you just touch him, feel him open around the tip of your finger; move it down his perineum and then up again. He’s breathing heavily. The sounds barely sound like breathing at all. The less settled he is, the calmer you feel. Maybe you could do this all night. Just feeling him until his asshole no longer registers as part of his body. It’s just a collection of abstract sensations. You push your finger in a little bit deeper, and feel his hips jerk. Before you fully realize what you’re doing, you push it all the way in. You listen to the sounds he makes. Slowly, he raises his hips a little bit off of the bed. You move your finger in and out, his body giving as though you were creating this space yourself. You penetrate him with two fingers. He moves back against you, fucks himself. You fuck him harder. You keep going. You barely feel like yourself. Now, you suppose, all three of you are here.  
Grief is such a personal thing. They say that it fades, but you’ve found that it is evergreen. Alfred was right: there are other kinds of memory than visual. The sight of grief may recede from you, but its scent, its feeling, as another presence and as something lodged in your body, have not faded. Its perfume rises through you, a long and dragging ache that you had sometimes mistaken for arousal, or for anger, or for common sadness, or for the love you felt for Thomas when he was alive, and you find-  
You’re not yet ready to let it go.  
You certainly aren’t ready to share it.  
Slowly, you withdraw your fingers from Alfred, feel as much as you hear his sigh. You try not to be upset with him. In a way, it was generous of him: he wanted to take your grief and mix it with his. It’s what lonely people do.  
But you’re not this lonely. There will, you know, come a time when you are, but until then--  
You rise from the bed. You go to the door. In the light that enters the room, you see him, his eyes still covered, his hands still tied. The knots are loose. Let him free himself, if that’s what he wants. You said it before: you’re not that obliging.


End file.
